A SELF-PROFESSED temple medium was prepared to jump out of his bedroom window alone when he saw his friends hesitating behind him.

In the early hours of Aug 23 last year, Ku Witaya, 16, told his friends he was not forcing them to do anything. He added that those who wanted to go should 'just go'.

IMAGINE walking into a concrete jungle that harnesses available breezes, for instance, to create a cooler park-like environment.

Or living in an HDB project offering a heightened quality of life, perhaps featuring European-style courtyards as part of a sustainable development drive.

INSTEAD of offering something for everyone, shops could focus on serving certain niche groups, such as older shoppers, to improve their odds of survival.

At the annual Singapore Retailers Industry Conference which kicked off on Tuesday, industry observers noted that stores here tend to target broad consumer groups, such as youth, working professionals and women, who have been shown by research to spend more.

FROM now on, retail investors can expect financial products to fall clearly into two categories.

Products that fully protect an investor's principal sum are labelled 'capital guaranteed' - anything else carries the possibility of a loss.

That's because the Singapore's financial regulators have decided to ban a puzzling in-between category of investments that currently carry the monikers 'capital protected' or 'principal protected'.